Freddie and I caught plenty of rainbows on that trip, but we didn't earn them. We paid out later, on the way home, helping one boy die, in company, and another get home, but the truth is, we were not foursquare, we did not catch our fish honestly on that trip.

At 11,000 feet in the West Elks, below Maroon Bells, mid-week, we were alone. We tried for a day at the upper lake, because it seemed more manly somehow, to hike up to the box end, and try the wilder water. Not much luck. Some browns we threw back, too small.

All the next day, too, we just lazed at it. Stayed at the campground, the bigger lake, down below, tossing out flies and salmon eggs, gazing up at the splendid cliffs and ice, peering down into the pure-d blue. At riffles and shadows. What few trout there were wanted none of us. We both saw an 18 inch mother, full of her own eggs, who knew us for what we were, and glided right past our barbless hooks and amateur casts.

Turns out, just below the timberline was the upper limit for the stocking trucks. We were amazed to see it rumble up, around the chain on the ranger track and then backing up, to dump hundreds into the far side. We were in the shadow of the rocks, and the fish poured out like a mercury river in that high altitude sun, the whole of them smashing our burnt eyes with brilliant flash and bright mirrored sides. It sounded like gravy poured into hot grease.

Within a minute they found us, our poles bent and we grinned like hobos with stolen pie.

Frustrated boys in men's attire we were. We hooted with false pride, like this was doing something, reeling in starving fish, fresh from pampered ponds, delivered to us by a fat man in overalls, who didn't wait to see a thing, didn't look up at the fourteeners that surrounded him. Just back in the truck and gone.

No romance, no skills required, no cool at all. Just fish, correct size, healthy, and they pretty much volunteered.

We each caught our limit, twice what our willow creels would hold, in about 30 minutes. The overflow slapped our oily levis all the way back to the tent. We were so young. Only vaguely aware of anything but especially indifferent to how we wuz robbed, of triumph, of real accomplishment. After 2 days of freeze-dried crap we were too hungry to care.

We ate two fish each, rolled in cornmeal and fried in butter, and sucked the skulls empty. We sacrificed the cooler to ice the rest, and slurped warm grape Nehi and beer all the next day. But ah, that night. We felt like Patton's conquering tankers, rested on a log, stoned and beery and stinking of fish and sweat, poking and stirring the fire until alpine breezes descended, pulled chill off the snow that haunted the peaks above us, and blew it gently, like a lover, into our tearing eyes.

At dusk the next day we drove back, passing Idaho Springs in the dark on I-70, missing the divide the moment we passed it, dropping onto that 50 mile ramp into miserable Denver. We re-told the details to each other: the silver splashy shimmer of live meat pouring in that tube of water into the glacial blue of the lake; the easy view we had, perfect, that let us twitch, touch, YANK/hooked! Our clever eye, on each cast, on their glacine, fishy jaws. Their blinkless thrash, our perfect timing, our perfect tension, hauling in, again and again.

I glanced at the river along the highway, still swollen with late spring runoff, as if I could still see with special powers, like I knew Where Fish Were now. The limitless stupidity of us. The way we could pretend we had really Done something. Frauds we were, happy liars, much too young, not quite men.

A van, brown and old, barrelled past us, shifting our pale VW Rabbit a foot to the left in response.

A few miles further, where the natural canyon was re-engineered, where narrow, steep walls crowd the highway, and the macadam had to  perch up top, on a scree of fist-sized, manmade rock, draped in a long pile that fell straight into the river, we saw red blurry blinking. A few feet into the right lane, goddamn dangerous in this meagre rain, hastily parked; someone running back to that blinking car, and a woman, motionless, peering over the edge.

We pulled over, just behind them, trying to get out of the lane. The moon, obscured behind the rain, gave everything a tepid glow. In the light drizzle we joined her, wordless, our toes pointing into the abrupt dark and infinite fallaway, toward the crashing river a hundred yards below.

At the end of that long slope the cording river twisted, braided, over and under boulders of rough size. No trees or scrub obscured our view, and the heavy gravel ended at water's edge. Twenty feet in, the front end of the brown van tilted down, its headlights just under the rushing water. I got instant cold, looking at that light.

Our eyes adjusted, and we saw to slide down, sideways, Freddy and I, sneakers failing to grip the hard stones, so we sat, a controlled fall, the only safe way to descend. Foolish young men, we just went down. Above us a semi hit its brakes, we heard someone shouting, and a flashlight, then another, played on our backs as we cut our hands on the wet, sharp rocks.

Halfway down that awful, endless rock drift we saw him, crawling up to us. The endless roar of the river separated now from the endless keening scream of this drunk boy. His eyes were bright, unfocused, wide, his mouth open, his arms tight and fixed under his broken chest as he tried to climb with hands alone, his shoulders bloody. We veered to him, I slid to his side, and saw that one foot was on backwards.

We couldn't lift him. It was too slippery. We tried and his shriek went up an octave and he passed out. We stopped, ragged breaths, soaked now, our hands fluttering around him. I hoped my armstrong would tell me what to do. We grappled and got him moving, both Freddy and I on our backs, digging our heels in, pushing up inches at a time. The boy woke up screaming. Freddy, who was only 17, was crying.

We got him up only about ten feet when two more people, a man and a woman, joined us, him with a blanket, her with a lantern, and him and Freddy pushed it under the boy, who made noises like a gutted dog. They dragged him sideways, making headway now, up the jagged rocks. More noises up above, a CB turned up, people saying something about leaving him there. The man with the blanket was cursing.

I turned and slid the rest of the way down, the woman a dozen yards behind me, and when I got to the water I saw him, the driver, bent so wrong, so terribly wrong I will not describe it now. I cannot say what I saw, not to you, not to my wife, not to anyone.

He was another drunk boy -- and he was a boy, a high school boy, in a reddened sweatshirt -- and he looked at us. He was sitting in water, his head on bent metal. The woman's light shown on him as he slid his eyes around, then found me again. We held there.

He smiled, and then that poor boy died.

Half way up the slope I looked back. The headlights were out. EMTs passed us, going down.

We saved the other one, though. He was wrapped in my sleeping bag, Freddy's idea, so we followed the ambulance to Mercy, and waited. He was still too drunk for pain meds, and they had to set the collarbone and the ankle without them. He screamed again, each time, and passed out, then woke up, each time, there in the ER. I collected the stained bag and we drove silently through the pre-dawn of grey suburbs and mauvish sky, gliding effortlessly into the smooth driveway at home.

I couldn't eat those fish. I let them go bad. I kept promising myself I would go get them from the trunk, but a few days later I just double-bagged them and threw the whole mess away.